George Martin: The Beatles’ Steady Hand
Faced with four total stoners, George Martin produced the most famous body of work ever recorded
Now that George Martin has died, there’s going to be a lot of (deserved) eulogies. And here’s another.
George Martin’s back catalogue is a brilliant and strange one — he was the man at the desk for The Beatles most famously, but he’s also had a hand in recording The Archers theme tune, ‘Goldfinger’ by Shirley Bassey, Temperance Seven cuts, Goons recordings, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, Cilla’s ‘Alfie’, Macca and MJ’s ‘Say Say Say’, and a bunch of other stuff.
That’ll be talked about elsewhere no doubt, but I’d like to talk about George Martin — translator of musician nonsense.
Imagine, this pretty square, but ultimately pleasant guy, faced with four total stoners and their whims. That was George Martin’s role with The Beatles, who even when they were all at retirement age, he still referred to affectionately as ‘the boys.’ The Beatles would be getting messy, and coming up with preposterous stoner ideas, and George — instead of muttering ‘for fuck’s sake’ or having it out with his charges and throwing his weight around like a lot of record producers did in the 60s and 70s — was ever the problem solver, and pragmatist.
On record, you can hear The Beatles’ minds wandering — songs switch pace because they feel like it, or have daft count-ins for no discernible reason, and have unusual instruments thrown in just because. They were almost Beavis & Butthead like with their attention spans, giggling into their chests and then deciding to piss off to India for a bit.
John Lennon was known for his daft requests, on separate occasions, asking George Martin to make him sound like ‘paper,’ ‘orange,’ and ‘like a hundred Tibetan monks on a hill.’ Now, while most people would’ve told a mid-twenties stoner to shut their stupid faces, George Martin clearly liked the challenge; achingly middle class and polite, you can almost imagine George rolling up his white shirt sleeves, straightening his tie, lighting up a cigarette and thinking ‘righto boys, let’s see what we can do.’
Of course, George Martin’s input into Beatle records is immense — ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was his moment to show off how deft he was with an orchestra, with a stoned Paul McCartney gibbering on about something he’d heard at the Proms on the radio, not knowing what the instruments were called, and wrongly remembering which composer he’d heard. Martin managed to decipher what Macca was talking about, and pretty much invented baroque-rock on the spot.
George Harrison once gave George Martin instructions for a record that went: “It doesn’t go like that — it goes like that; but it goes like that, and then it goes to everything… you know what I mean?”
Somehow, George Martin always knew what they meant. Through chopped up tapes being sellotaped together, sorting Paul McCartney out when he basically decided to make some ragtime time songs because that day’s weed was particularly good, to getting a full orchestra to play out-of-time with each other in the crescendo in ‘A Day In The Life’, to listening to John Lennon say that he wanted to be swung from the ceiling in a pulley and harness job, so he could sound like he was flying on a recording, George Martin was the most patient man in rock music.
If you think about how annoying it is when someone is trying to tell you something when they’re blind drunk, with half finished sentences and completely garbled nonsense coming out of their mouths, most of us would be tempted to take the piss, or even get incredibly annoyed. With four young men, taking drugs and talking absolute shit, George Martin somehow kept his patience, and not only that, manned and steadied the wheel on the most famous body of recorded work ever committed to tape.
George Martin’s patience was coupled with a nerdy, curiosity to go along with The Beatles’ high-as-fuck ideas, and really, that’s the perfect person for a job at the mixing desk. No dick-swinging and trying to keep up with his band’s intake, but rather, more like a line-manager, getting things done while everyone else messes around.
God bless you George Martin. You died at a grand enough age, so there’s not much cause to be overly sad, but I’ll go listen to ‘For No One’ now, and marvel at the countless times you managed to capture lightning in a bottle.
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